According to TMZ, police have positively identified the two men they are currently questioning as the men seen on the surveillance video the night of the attack, and the men - who are brothers - are Nigerians who were both extras on Smollett's show "Empire". They are now being described by police as 'suspects'.

Smollett has identified his attackers as white. TMZ says they have confirmed that the two Nigerian brothers are black. Smollett said during his Good Morning America interview on Thursday that he is positive the two men on the video are the ones who attacked him.

The men left for Nigeria right after the attack but police ID'd them through phone and transportation records and were waiting for them at O'Hare airport when they returned Wednesday night.

The brothers' lawyer, Gloria Schmidt, says their home was raided and searched by police and that they are acquaintances of Smollett who have no idea why they are suspects: “When they first learned about what happened to him they were horrified. This is someone they know. This is someone they’ve worked with, so they don’t want to see somebody go through that.”

Sorry, everyone - I submitted this post 12 hours before it was posted, before the last post on this case was even up. I just woke up and am now updating with more current information.

HYPOTHETICALLY a person who would fake something like this would probably not expect to be found out. They would gain sympathy, attention, and notoriety. Now everyone knows his name. Classic narcissistic behavior.

I’m not sure what the hell is going on here, but I live in Chicago and for real do not trust the CPD. Why are they leaking so much info about an active investigation? Contradicting themselves and changing the story. Requesting his phone records like they weren’t about to start leaking private things. Shady af imo.

yeah IA, it's not an unbelievably huge stretch to imagine someone seeing this as a quick way to garner attention/sympathy. I keep thinking of that McCain supporter (it may have been Romney, idk) way back when who said she was jumped by Obama supporters and while that was easily disproven, it just illustrates that, well... people do the most inexplicable shit sometimes

i mean i have a tendency not to believe crazy shit even though life is wild, but when the whole "it was STAGED!" thing appeared it looked a lot like a typical dumb internet conspiracy theory to me. kind of like when ppl claimed to have ID'd the guy who punched richard spencer and it was this weird cuck fetish dude, like if you thought about that one critically for two seconds it was so obviously internet bs.

Stating upfront that I believe Jussie and will until his account is unequivocally shown to be false.

That said, in a case like this it could be possible that he told a few people an exaggerated or embellished account of what happened. When that account got leaked to the public, he was kind of stuck with it.

Again, just one explanation as to how a situation like this could snowball into something never intended.

that's what the assumption would've been, but going with latest reports it would be that it was all planned previously WITH the involvement of others and careful orchestration? that seems way less believable than "a story he told friends for attention got out of hand"... whew so much makes no sense.

well it definitely doesn't make logical sense, but either way there are elements missing so i'm just waiting to hear the full "case", whatever it may be. i mean a day ago we didn't know that the police knew who the two men in the video were, but they knew their ID and have been tracking them, so who knows what else is known right now. for example, is one reason that the police wanted jussie's phone records was to check if he'd ever contacted these individuals?

to me the more logical explanation as of now is that these people (the ones in custody) planned a kind of "fake" attack against him, for whatever reason. and jussie did not know of their identities.

the more wild explanation is that jussie AND others orchestrated it together. that would involve so many things and people that it seems to defy logic. but both scenarios are insane.